The first report from Gladius arrived on the morning of the second day.
Doflamingo read it in his office, standing before the bay window, the glass of red wine he had not yet touched sitting on the edge of the desk to his right. Outside, Dressrosa was waking with the usual noise of a city that didn't really know whether it was happy or not but kept going anyway.
The report was concise. Gladius wrote the way he spoke — little, precisely, without ornament.
Day 2. The subject has been reading for 14 consecutive hours. He eats little. He sleeps less. His behavior remains calm but his words have changed. He speaks of beings. Beings beyond the known universe. He says the book is explaining his place in the general scheme. He is not agitated. He is... convinced.
Doflamingo reread the last line.
Convinced.
He thought about what he knew of the book — not much, in reality. An anomaly that modified the thinking of those who read it. He had known that before buying it. He had bought it precisely for that reason. A tool of mental manipulation of absolute discretion, acting without violence, without coercion, transforming people from within without their knowing or opposing it.
The idea that an unimportant prisoner in a basement cell was beginning to find his place in the general scheme was exactly what he had wanted to see.
He set the report down.
— Continue the observation, he said into the Den Den Mushi. Report tomorrow morning.
— Understood, said Gladius.
The connection cut.
The second report did not arrive in the morning.
It arrived in the evening — later than expected, shorter than the previous one, with something in its style that didn't quite resemble Gladius. Not the words — the words were his. But their organization, their rhythm, the way the sentences followed one another with a slight haste that was not in his habits.
The subject speaks a great deal now. He says the beings the book describes have chosen him. That the message was meant for him. That all humans are vessels. Receptacles for something greater. He says some receptacles are pure and others are not. He says the impure must be
The sentence stopped there.
No period. No conclusion. Just an unfinished sentence, as though Gladius had been interrupted or had decided not to finish what he had begun to write.
Doflamingo looked at this report for a long time.
The unfinished sentence interested him more than the rest. Gladius was not the kind of man to leave sentences suspended. He was precise, methodical, of an almost mechanical rigor in everything he did. The fact that he had started something and not finished it said something.
— Gladius, he said into the Den Den Mushi.
No immediate response. Then :
— Yes.
— Your report is incomplete.
A silence.
— I know.
— Finish it.
Another silence — longer this time.
— The subject says the impure must be sacrificed, said Gladius. To purify the receptacle. To prepare the arrival.
His voice was normal. Steady. Precisely normal in a way that was slightly too careful.
— The arrival of what? said Doflamingo.
— The beings, said Gladius. Those the book speaks of.
— Continue watching, said Doflamingo. Report tomorrow.
He hung up.
He remained standing before the bay window with Dressrosa's port below and the night beginning to fall over the sea, and he thought about the way Gladius had said the beings — not according to the subject or according to what he claims, just the beings, with the neutrality of someone reporting a fact rather than an assertion.
He noted that. Without making more of it for now.
The third report did not arrive.
Neither in the morning nor in the evening. The Den Den Mushi in Doflamingo's office stayed silent all day. He sent a message to Baby 5 — who was on duty in the lower levels of the castle — asking her to check the cell.
Baby 5's reply came twenty minutes later.
Her voice was different from usual — not exactly worried, but with something in it that one needed to know Baby 5 to identify. That way she had when she didn't know if what she was seeing was a problem or not and was waiting to be told how to react.
— Lord Doflamingo. The cell is open. The prisoner is inside. But...
— But what.
— He isn't moving. I think he's dead. And Gladius isn't there anymore. And the book...
— The book.
— It isn't there anymore either.
Doflamingo set the Den Den Mushi on the desk with the precise care of a man controlling very carefully what his hands were doing at that moment.
He took a breath.
Then he stood and left his office.
The cell was exactly as Baby 5 had described.
The prisoner was on the floor — not in the position of someone who had collapsed, not in that of someone who had struggled. In the position of someone who had been placed there, deliberately, with an almost ceremonial care. Arms along the body, head tilted slightly to one side, eyes open and fixed on the ceiling with that particular expression of people who have seen something very large at the end and didn't have time to decide if it was magnificent or terrifying.
Doflamingo looked at him for a second.
He thought of the report. Of the unfinished sentence. Of the way Gladius had said beings without qualifying.
He understood now what had happened.
Gladius had spent two days watching a man who was reading the world to him aloud — who was explaining, with the conviction of someone who had found the ultimate truth, that this book was meant for him, that its content was a personal revelation, that the words on those pages were addressed to him and him alone. Gladius had heard that for forty-eight hours.
And something, in those forty-eight hours, had begun to resonate.
The book had not needed to be read. It had been enough to be near someone who had read it. To hear the words. To be in the space of someone whose conviction was total and communicative.
Doflamingo had not anticipated that.
He noted this failure of analysis mentally with the coldness of someone who did not forgive himself for calculation errors but who allowed himself the right to learn from them.
He left the cell. Turned toward Baby 5.
— Gladius. Where is he?
Baby 5 pointed upward.
He heard him before he saw him.
Gladius's voice — usually dry, economical, the kind of voice that only rose to say something useful — carried from the great ground-floor hall of the castle with an amplitude that had nothing to do with his ordinary way of speaking. Higher. More carried. With in its modulations something strange, exalted, that didn't fit with the man Doflamingo had known for years.
He descended the stairs.
The great hall was full.
Fifty men, perhaps more — ordinary henchmen, mid-ranking soldiers, staff members who had found themselves there by chance or curiosity and who now weren't leaving. Some sitting on the floor. Some standing against the walls. All looking in the same direction.
Toward Gladius.
He was standing on the first step of the central staircase — not on a platform, not in a theatrically chosen position, just where he happened to be, as though the place didn't matter because what counted was in the words. The book was in his left hand, held against his chest in that particular way of holding something one doesn't want to let go.
He was speaking.
Doflamingo stopped at the entrance to the hall and listened.
— ...what we call reality is only a layer. The most superficial layer of something infinitely greater. We are receptacles. That is our function. It is not an insult — it is a truth. The receptacle has value precisely because it contains something. And what we contain...
His voice dropped slightly, with the involuntary rhetorical effect — or perhaps very deliberate — of someone drawing their audience toward something precious.
— ...what we contain is waiting to be released. By them. By those the book speaks of. Those who are coming. Those who have always known we were here.
In the hall, no one spoke.
The fifty men were looking at Gladius with varied expressions — some clearly uncomfortable, some skeptical, some with that careful neutrality of people who were not convinced but were too afraid to show disrespect toward a superior officer to say so. None seemed won over to the cause. But none had left either.
They were there. They were listening.
And listening, Doflamingo knew better than most, was the first step.
He made a gesture with his hand.
Two of his officers who were near the entrance understood immediately — they moved toward Gladius with the fluidity of people who had executed silent orders often enough not to need to hear them articulated.
Gladius saw them coming.
He didn't stop speaking immediately — he continued for a few seconds, his eyes moving from his audience to the two approaching men, with the expression of someone evaluating the situation and deciding how to respond. Then he fell silent.
And he looked at Doflamingo.
Across the crowd, across the great hall, with the eyes of a man Doflamingo recognized — the same features, the same face, the same scars — but whose gaze had something different in it. Not hostility. Not fear. Something more troubling than both — certainty. The quiet certainty of someone who was convinced they were right and who was looking at someone else with the slightly condescending compassion of one who knows what the other does not yet know.
— Lord Doflamingo, said Gladius.
His voice had returned to its usual register — steady, precise. But the word Lord had in his mouth a slightly different quality, as though the title had lost a layer of meaning along the way.
— Gladius, said Doflamingo. With me.
— I still need to tell them—
— Now.
Gladius looked at the two officers beside him. Looked at the hall. Looked at the book in his hand.
Then he turned toward Doflamingo and said, with the calm of someone offering something precious to someone who didn't yet understand its value :
— I want to show you something. In these pages. Just a few lines. You'll understand. I know you'll understand — you're someone who sees further than others. That's why they chose you too. You are in these pages as well, I've seen it. Your name isn't there but your —
— Take him, said Doflamingo to the two officers.
They took Gladius.
He offered no physical resistance — his arms allowed themselves to be seized without tensing, his body followed without bracing. But his eyes remained fixed on Doflamingo as he was led away, with the expression of someone who provisionally accepted a setback knowing the truth would be heard eventually anyway.
The book fell to the floor when his arm was taken.
No one in the hall moved to pick it up.
Doflamingo looked at the book on the stone floor. He looked at it for several seconds — its plain cover, its title that slid off the eye, its calm and indifferent thickness.
Then he said aloud, without raising his voice, to no one in particular and to everyone at once :
— Someone picks up that book and puts it in the level seven safe. With gloves. Without opening it. Without looking at the pages. Directly.
A silence.
One of the officers stepped forward. Took out the gloves he wore at his belt — work gloves, not protective ones, but sufficient — and picked up the book without looking at it, eyes deliberately averted, as though the object were an explosive whose mechanism one should avoid examining.
He left the hall.
Doflamingo looked at the fifty remaining men.
— Return to your posts, he said.
They left.
The interrogation room was on the intermediate level of the castle — not the dungeons, not the official spaces. A place between the two, which appeared on no architectural plan and whose existence was known only to those who needed to know it.
Gladius was sitting on the room's single chair, hands free — Doflamingo had said not to bind him, and the two officers had stayed outside. It was just the two of them.
Doflamingo leaned against the wall opposite and looked at Gladius.
Gladius returned his gaze without discomfort — the way one looked at someone with whom one wanted to have a real conversation.
— Since when? said Doflamingo.
— Since the second day, said Gladius. When the subject explained to me that the message addressed itself to each reader individually. I looked at a few pages to understand what he meant.
— A few pages.
— Yes.
— And?
Gladius took a breath.
— The words were addressing me. Not in a generic way — to me. They described things I had told no one. Questions I had been asking myself for a long time about the nature of what we were doing here. About the meaning of all this. — He stopped. — I know this sounds like madness. I know what you're thinking. But Lord Doflamingo, if you just read—
— No, said Doflamingo.
Gladius closed his mouth.
— You killed the prisoner, said Doflamingo.
It was not a question.
— He had completed his function, said Gladius simply. He had transmitted the message. Keeping him alive no longer made sense.
— A function you decided yourself.
— That the book decided, said Gladius with the patience of someone correcting a misunderstanding. I only executed what was logical.
Doflamingo looked at him for a long moment.
Gladius was one of his oldest officers. Precise, reliable, a loyalty that had never wavered across several decades. A man whose personality had sharp edges — he could be violent, unpredictable in his reactions, unstable in certain ways. But fundamentally, he was his. He thought in terms of family, of organization, of hierarchy.
What was expressing itself across from him tonight was no longer quite that.
It was someone who thought in terms of book. Of message. Of beings whose exact nature Doflamingo still didn't know.
— You're staying here for now, said Doflamingo. No one comes to see you. No one speaks to you. If you need something, you go through the Den Den Mushi.
— I understand, said Gladius. — A pause. — But you should know that won't change anything. What I've seen doesn't get locked in a safe.
— Perhaps not, said Doflamingo.
He headed for the door.
— Lord Doflamingo.
He stopped without turning around.
— You bought this book somewhere. Someone sold it to you. That person — or that organization — knew what they were doing. Knew exactly what they were putting in your hands.
Doflamingo did not respond.
— I'm not saying this to threaten you, said Gladius. I'm saying it because if you think about who does this kind of trade — who sells things like this — you should perhaps ask yourself why they chose you to have it.
Doflamingo left.
Closed the door.
He went up to the roof of the castle.
Not for the view — well, not only for the view. But because the roof was one of the rare places in this building where he could be certain no one would hear him think.
Dressrosa was below, illuminated in the night with that golden light it had and which was one of the few things for which he had something that resembled tenderness. His city. His construction.
He thought of Gladius.
He thought of the prisoner dead in his cell, eyes open on something no one else could see.
He thought of the unfinished sentence in the report — the impure must be — and of what Gladius had finally said in the hall. Sacrificed. That was the missing word. The impure must be sacrificed.
He thought of fifty men in a hall who had listened without leaving.
One single man had read the book. One single man had come out of it convinced enough to kill. And in two days, that man had been enough to create the conditions for a spread — not a wide spread, not yet, but an exposure. Fifty people who had heard. Who now had the words somewhere in their minds.
How many of them would think about it tonight?
How many would speak of it to someone tomorrow morning?
He thought of what Gladius had said last.
You should perhaps ask yourself why they chose you to have it.
Marshall, Carter and Dark. Voss. That man on a dark wood stage with his red curtains and his two hundred empty seats, selling impossible objects with the calm of a professional who knew exactly what he was doing.
Doflamingo had not doubted the transaction for a single instant. He had bought something he wanted, he had paid a price he could pay, he had left with the object. The commercial logic was clear and satisfying.
Now, for the first time, he wondered if commercial logic was the only logic at play.
Why him?
He had the resources. He had the ambitions. He had the profile of someone to whom one could sell something like SCP-1425 — someone who saw the utility of a tool of mental manipulation, who had no moral scruples about the use he would make of it, who was intelligent enough to understand what he was buying without being afraid of it.
But had he been sold a tool?
Or had he been sold a problem?
He looked at the sea in the distance.
SCP-1425 was in the level seven safe, triple-locked, with orders that no one come near it. Gladius was in confinement. The prisoner was dead. The fifty men from the hall had returned to their posts and were probably sleeping now, or pretending to.
Manageable.
For now.
But he had learned something tonight that Voss had not specified in his presentation — something the auctioneer had either omitted by chance or omitted deliberately.
The book did not need to be read to spread.
It was enough to have one person who had been convinced.
One person who spoke.
He looked at Dressrosa below him — his city, its inhabitants, its flamingos sleeping in the public gardens — and for the first time in a very long time, Don Quixote Doflamingo felt something he did not often allow himself the luxury of feeling.
A caution that resembled, very closely, worry.
He went back inside.
Picked up the Den Den Mushi.
— Baby 5. Tell the main family members I want to see them tomorrow morning. All of them.
— All the senior officers? said Baby 5.
— All of them, he said. And tell them it's important.
He hung up.
Remained standing in his office with the night of Dressrosa behind him and the level seven safe somewhere below, in which a book was waiting with the quiet patience of an object that had no reason to hurry.
Things that were true never needed to hurry.
That, at bottom, was what worried him most.
End of Chapter 10